by David Adjmi
In the moment, I felt that same black veneration. I understood that rage. I was trembling with rage as Leslie’s laughter echoed inside the cavelike hollow of my closet. I trusted people and I’d been screwed over, just like Stevie screwed Richie, and my father screwed over my mother. That was reality. It was how the world worked. I knew I had to embrace my own moral ugliness—because it enabled me to survive.
As I lay at the foot of the closet I could feel a power buoying me, a strength I always knew I had, but it was activated in a new way. I could feel my mother symbolically presiding over me, wreathed in endless sputtering ovals of cigarette smoke, her face burning with vengeance, lit as if by the flaming sword of an archangel.
Save Us, Superman!
IT WAS THE second week of the semester, I was on my way to the Sarah Lawrence library when I noticed a woman crossing a small trellised path bisecting the Westlands Lawn. The woman had on a very elaborate, couture-seeming taffeta dress tiered with sashes and culminating at the neck in an almost Elizabethan ruff. But it was the hair—long and thin, crowned with the signature elfin bangs—that gave her away. Though our conversations had gotten more elliptic and distant, I still counted Vivian among my closest friends. But when she caught sight of me she seemed dismayed. “Oh, you’re here,” she said, as if describing a square of linoleum. She stood very erect, and there was a crisp glare in her eyes. The puckishness and humor were gone. She was unhealthily thin. Her cheeks were sunken in like those models in the Calvin Klein ads, eyes lined with dark circles—but she looked beautiful, more beautiful than I’d ever seen her. I got a good look at her dress, which was impeccably made: it was iridescent green and grape; the color changed when the fabric shifted in the light. I was wearing shitty Army pants and a cheap T-shirt I got for five bucks at the Antique Boutique—but that was how I wanted it now, the sartorial equivalent of a buzz cut, clean and nondescript.
“When did you get here?” she said.
“Last week.”
“It’s a cool place. The people are interesting.”
“It seems that way,” I said, manufacturing a weird grammatical politeness on the spot. I found her tone slightly unnerving—a tense alloy of forced and relaxed—and I lost the ability to make spontaneous conversation. “You look really well. Do you live on campus?”
Vivian produced a pack of blue Dunhills—Harper Goldfarb’s brand—and lit a cigarette.
“No,” she said, “I have a place in Manhattan with my boyfriend.” She stared expressionlessly as she spoke and held her regal posture, her neck stiffly caged like those women in gilt-framed portraits. I noticed she’d lost her Brooklyn accent entirely—in fact I could see no trace of her former self, no winking acknowledgment that there was some other history to refer to. That history was gone now, and I marveled at the erasure.
We exchanged a few pleasantries, but eventually the duress of strained humor wore us both down. “You should give me a call sometime,” she said in a valedictory tone, then blew a single smoke ring. Vivian had become a character in Slaves of New York or Stephen Saban’s column in Paper. She was a new person, and the new person had contempt for me. The new person occupied some rarefied station in life, and I was just some ugly vestige from her past. Though it hurt me, I understood—and anyway, now I had greater ambitions.
In the first semester of my sophomore year at USC, Cathy made a grand announcement outside Café Eighty-Fuck. “I’ve decided to become an intellectual,” she said. She told me she felt burdened by the superficies of Southern California, that she was applying to transfer to some other school, one that was more serious. I found myself oddly threatened by her announcement. Should I become an intellectual too? Chastened by her abrupt change in direction, I felt I had to match it. Within days I re-applied to Sarah Lawrence as a transfer student.
Even in that first week it was a relief to be back on the East Coast—away from stupid football games and vapid Californians with their tinted sun visors. At Sarah Lawrence there were no giant lecture halls, but intimate seminars in Tudor houses with little fireplaces. There were no grades because grades were vulgar; no tests because multiple-choice questions weren’t a metric of actual knowledge. To me, it was heaven.
I made my initial pilgrimage to the library, which was newish—no carved alcoves, no intaglios of dark lacquered wood, no rooms with rare folios. Instead, there was a Norwegian-feeling sunken floor area filled with oversized floor pillows. The room was encased with glass walls like an aquarium and shrouded in silence. If anyone dared whisper a single syllable the whole room would turn against them with an enfilade of SHHHs and dirty looks. With all my sensitivity to noises and movements, I was in ecstasy.
I picked a pillow and sat with my copy of Beyond Good and Evil. It was like sitting with a boxful of jewels. There were no courses that semester on Nietzsche, so I’d devised an independent study. I knew nothing of him except for quotes like “God is dead” and the Barbara Stanwyck movie where she turned into an ice-veined harridan after reading him, but Nietzsche seemed the most serious of philosophers, and I wanted to become a serious person.
I gazed for a moment at the cover, which had an image of a beady-eyed man with a gigantic mustache. He wasn’t handsome but I wanted to caress his hideous face, I wanted to stroke his mustache that desperately needed grooming. I knew at that shining moment, lounging on my huge pillow, white Westchester light streaming through the tall glass walls, that my life was about to change. I could sense this wasn’t just a book, it was a passageway between realms. I closed my eyes and made myself empty inside, a receptacle for knowledge and nothing more.
The first few pages were exhilarating—though Nietzsche activated my bad self-esteem. Reading him, at times I could feel myself adopting a fake posture, like I was at a dinner party and didn’t want to betray my own stupidity; I’d never read philosophy before, except for Plato’s Republic and a couple of Ralph Waldo Emerson essays. Nietzsche was nothing like Emerson. He was provocative and sort of intense—and at first, I liked the provocations. But the further I got into the book, the more I felt my joy and anticipatory excitement turn to horror.
The truth was that Nietzsche seemed kind of crazy. His writing was extremely overheated. He seemed to be shouting at you constantly. There was a lot of talk of hammers and an overuse of exclamation points. He hated women. He was demeaning to other philosophers. He compared people to apes and worms (and at one point he used the phrase “pygmy animal,” which sounded racist). He talked about things like pulling yourself up from a “swamp of nothingness* by the roots of your hair.” I tried to picture myself ripping out my hair and pulling myself out of a swamp—a swamp of nothingness, no less—and felt sick to my stomach. It kept going like this, page after page: Nietzsche seemed deranged, but at the same time the derangement in the writing seemed urgent and potentially important. He was cruel, but there was something bracing and lucid in all the cruelty. “Almost everything we call higher culture,” he wrote, “is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty.” Could cruelty be spiritual and beautiful? Could cruelty, if you just intensified it, be a portal into culture?
A few pages in, he wrote that “charity is a malady” and I thought of Richie, my charitable, obedient brother whom Nietzsche would have hated. I thought of my mother’s screeds about selfishness, and how much I’d been helped by them. Though much of what Nietzsche wrote felt wrong, maybe there was something right in all the wrongness.
In the aura of these mingled feelings, I grasped my yellow highlighter like a weapon, marking anything that seemed provocative or obscure so that my book glowed with haunted citric light. I read on, my stomach in knots: underlining passages, cradling his abuses to my little masochistic bosom. I was terrified of Nietzsche, and I fought him in my mind, echoing his cruel tenor with my notes in the margins: “Total contradiction!” “Smacks of DOGMA?!” “What does that EVEN MEAN?!!” I was fighting, fighting, but then I would feel myself being pulled by the seductive violence in the writing: the c
onvulsing shocks and stabs, the polemical overuse of exclamation points. I wanted to hide from the klieg lights of Nietzsche’s horrible merciless scrutiny—but I wanted to be exposed, too, and he could see me. He was calling to me with adjurations and warnings from the dead.
By the time I left the library there was so much exhortation and shouting and exclamation points that I felt slightly traumatized. I walked to my dorm room in a state of electrified horror. The Westlands Lawn was dark and desolate, like a graveyard. I was trembling with exhaustion. I felt the way I imagined prisoners in movies did when guards stripped them naked and sprayed them with some harsh cleansing acid: unhealthily cleaned, scoured to the point of illness.
I lived in a Tudor-style dorm called Gilbert. It was idyllic, the shining opposite of USC’s styrofoam-and-caulk monoliths. My room smelled of thyme and moldering wood. Outside my window were tapering vistas. In winter the roofs shone with snow-capped domes and gables. In the daytime bald white patches of sunlight peeked through branches of trees. I shared a single room with Kaspar, a transfer student from Antioch. He mainly ignored me that first week. When I entered I saw him at his desk, facing the window. He was wearing only Fruit of the Loom underwear, and reading a book. His body was small—almost a child’s body—and his fingers were long and thin like insect antennae.
I tiptoed to my bed, so as not to disturb him.
Kaspar swiveled his chair around to face me. “Mmm, Deved . . .” he said, “did you have a, errrr, productive evening?”
“Sorry, I hope I wasn’t loud.”
“No, no,” he said, and he put down his book.
“I checked out the library.”
Kaspar was the oddest-looking person I’d ever seen. His eyes were tiny and black and bulged like a beetle’s. His cheeks were sunken in and set in relief against two protruding lips. The sides of his head were shaved, and the top flopped downward, draping his head like a black shroud. “And mmmm did you get . . . work done?”
“Yeah, it was productive.”
“And mmmm, what are you reading, pray tell—errrrrr?”
“Beyond Good and Evil,” I replied.
His eyes seemed to dilate. “Ah, Nietzsche . . .” he said, and his face widened with an initially multivalent spreading of features and flesh that resolved into a kind of smile. “Who is unthinkable without Schopenhauer, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, not knowing who Schopenhauer was or what he was talking about.
Kaspar’s speaking voice was bizarrely deep for someone so physically tiny. He sporadically switched octaves midsentence as if tuning an instrument, punctuating his words with bizarre “mmm” noises. He’d gesticulate by holding his index and middle fingers together, and canting his head right then left. His speech and movement seemed alien, almost mechanized, and seemed to point to some deeply alien spiritual referent.
“And what are you reading there?” I asked him. He lifted the book. It was one of those Penguin titles with the black border, something called Gargantua and Pantagruel. It sounded horrible to me, but exactly the kind of book I imagined him liking. “What class is it for?”
“It’s not for mmmm class. It’s, errrr, for a literary journal I edit.”
Clearly Kaspar was formidable. He was an intellectual—but the other students thought he was creepy. He was always marching up and down paths in solitary ennui, with his flopping hair and bulging features, his tiny insect body swimming in the bulk of his trench coat.
I defended him to people. I was drawn to Kaspar the way one might be drawn to a lost animal. I wanted to believe his ugliness betokened some quarried, gemlike beauty. Sharing a single room lent a proximal intimacy to our relationship: I could hear the tiny bones in his bare feet crack when he walked around; I could hear him singing Elvis Costello and “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” in his off-key baritone while showering. He was so vulnerable and weird. His oddness and smallness and physical ugliness made me want to care for him—and at the same time I was magnetized by his brilliance.
Starved as I was for instruction, an informal tutelage began between us. Kaspar became my teacher, and I threw myself into my education. I purchased something called a Barron’s Vocabulary Builder and a pack of index cards. I made hundreds of flash cards with words I got from combing through the book. I taped the cards in a grid on the wall near my bed. Every morning upon waking I’d memorize definitions. I read Heidegger, Kafka, Derrida. I read essays with titles like “What Is the Thingness of a Thing?” Each day I worked myself to the point of exhaustion as a point of pride. I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need food. My own pleasure or well-being was not a consideration—it should feel grueling, I thought. I saw myself as a rare stone that needed polishing and cutting. I was a brilliant gleaming diamond that only looked lumpen and black because I was untended.
Cathy transferred to Barnard that January, and I invited her to visit me in Bronxville just before New Year’s. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year, I was still in the pupa of my self-creation, but I wondered if she’d be able to see my still-forming spiritual greatness: would it be visible to the naked eye? I was polishing my spiritual beauty like it was a genie lamp, burnishing it for her delectation. When I picked her up from the Metro North station Cathy looked like a different person: gone were the fluorescent water bottles and fanny packs. She stopped bleaching and perming her hair; now it was flat and mousy brown. She wore a denim jacket, crappy shoes, jeans with rips and holes. She’d begun listening to Joni Mitchell. She purchased the new Indigo Girls and Ani DiFranco. It was a holiday weekend and the campus was emptying out, but I took her on a tour of it. I explained how the Oxford system worked, how much I liked the small classes, and the little Tudor buildings, and the fireplaces in classrooms. I explained how the other students were arty and troubled but that the trouble rippled with interesting details. I was cultured, not the rube she met last year who devoured all-you-can-eat focaccia at the Souplantation. I read aloud to her from Thus Spake Zarathustra. I spoke about cubism. I gave myself a psychological air. Was my greatness visible now? Now?
That afternoon I wanted to screen Bergman’s Persona for her in one of the AV rooms in the library. “I don’t really want to watch a movie,” she demurred. “You’ve got to!” I said hotly. “I’m locking you in!” Then I locked her in the AV room and watched the whole thing with her. I had to share this secret, this film that represented a part of me, a part I’d only hinted at. The movie was about fracturing identities, loneliness, desperation—things that pointed to a kind of profundity I wanted her to see in me. When it was over she was so shaken by the film, she couldn’t speak.
Cathy was the first person I knew who understood pain in the way I felt it. Her mother died of cancer when she was very young, and that death affected her in ways she hadn’t yet come to understand. She hadn’t been to therapy, she couldn’t speak openly of it. And we were just twenty years old, when anguish and its expression are still secrets to be buried. But the secrets gleamed in our eyes. And like the silver film crusting the surface of a lotto ticket, we couldn’t help but scratch at them. Now that we were on the East Coast it was like some metaphysical filter was lifted and we began to reveal more of ourselves; the biographical details magnified into folios of wrenching sadness. The sadness became so constant, it had to be a mark of authenticity: it was the most stable thing either of us knew—it felt like a kind of bedrock. We began to take full ownership of this new, composite grief. We held grief almost in a kind of copyright. Every apparent satisfaction was merely a prelude to some new distress. The line between pleasure and distress was blurred. Sad things felt fulfilling and we confused the fulfillment for happiness.
That spring we were inseparable. I’d drive down to Morningside Heights and we’d walk to the Hungarian Pastry Shop and read together. We devoured culture with an ardor bordering on hysteria. Cathy was doing a whole class on Pascal and Montaigne. I was reading Kafka and Foucault. We had a relay race of personal development; we were doing research for character
s we would eventually play in life. We both wanted to be intellectuals, but there were different subcategories of intellectuals. There were warm intellectuals. There were nasty intellectuals, humorous ones. I was leaning toward becoming a dour, exacting intellectual like my English professor Danny Kaiser, with his jackal laugh and his shocked responses to students not having read important books like Absalom, Absalom! Cathy’s intellectual was more stolid and a little depressive. We were equally drawn to stories of disintegrating and splintering psyches and felt it was glamorous to see this depicted in art—like running into a movie star at your favorite restaurant. Our cold-eyed apprehension of life thrilled us, it felt very grown-up. But where my tastes could sometimes get very lowbrow (I could enjoy bland pablum and stupid sitcom folderol) Cathy hated that mainstream garbage—she was too serious for that. “Ugh,” she’d pule at the merest suggestion we see a dumb lowbrow movie, “it’s so sickening!” She hated stupid action movies. She hated Pretty Woman and Julia Roberts. The ideological content of that movie in particular repulsed her: that a prostitute could be redeemed and “saved” by a man! I’d come to accept vis-à-vis Drew Casper’s vocal love for Doris Day that lowbrow things had value. I could partition my mind and maintain a space in it where I could enjoy movies like Pretty Woman, but Cathy could not. Like me, she was getting priggish about her certainties, only more so. She only wanted to go to foreign movies at the Lincoln Plaza: Un Coeur en Hiver and La Belle Noiseuse and the Kieślowski films. She fell under the influence of writers like Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath. She liked the languid, doomed women in nouveaux romans, women who were unhappy and wanted to be annihilated by doomed sexual encounters.
